Jimmy Buffi, left, and Doug Fearing left their jobs as quantitative analysts with the Dodgers to expand their cutting-edge work beyond Major League Baseball. (Photos courtesy of Doug Fearing and Jimmy Buffi)

Team photo day at Dodger Stadium requires time and space. One afternoon each year, all the players and coaches walk from the clubhouse to left field. They climb a series of portable bleacher seats to assemble a sea of white, outnumbered by rows of non-uniformed staff. A team photographer ascends a tall ladder. Several photos are snapped. The process lasts about 90 minutes from set-up to tear-down.

Wednesday was team photo day at Zelus Analytics in Austin, Texas, where president Doug Fearing and his seven full-time employees were quickly on to bigger and better things. In Culver City, Reboot Motion co-founder and CEO Jimmy Buffi hasn’t even scheduled a photo day yet. His company has barely existed for a month. It consists of two employees: co-founder Evan Demchick and Buffi, whose commute now spans the length of his bedroom.

Fearing and Buffi recently comprised 10 percent of the Dodgers’ research and development team. A year ago, Fearing left to launch his own startup analytics firm. Buffi did the same after the Dodgers were eliminated from the playoffs in October. Their exits from baseball did not shake the industry. They occurred in relative darkness next to those of two former general managers – Ned Colletti became a pro scout for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks in September, and Paul DePodesta has been the Cleveland Browns’ chief strategy officer since 2016.

But the determination of Fearing and Buffi to strike out on their own – or, more preferably, capture the private sector’s version of an elusive World Series championship – is more instructive. It casts the existence of a team like the Dodgers as not a social institution, or merely a big business, but as a development vehicle for entrepreneurs whose innovation might be incidental to the actual game of baseball.

To put this in context, go back to last winter. Several teams went on a surprising hiring spree, plucking coaches from the ranks of independent consultants. Robert Van Scoyoc (Dodgers), Johnny Washington (Padres) and Tim Laker (Mariners) became major league hitting coaches in the span of a month. A fourth Craig Wallenbrock disciple, Brant Brown, was named the Dodgers’ hitting strategist. The Angels reached even farther outside of the box by hiring Derek Florko, who had never worked in professional baseball, to be the hitting coach at Class-A Inland Empire.

The trend hasn’t slowed. In October the Reds hired Kyle Boddy, the founder of the independent Driveline training facility, to be the team’s director of pitching initiatives/pitching coordinator. If outside consultants gaining acceptance into professional baseball is what’s now, the career arc of Fearing and Buffi could signal what’s next.

To understand why you have to appreciate the skill set of an analyst like Fearing or Buffi.

Fearing got his Ph.D. in operations research from MIT in 2010. Buffi got his Ph.D. in biomechanical engineering from Northwestern in 2014. The data they crunched for the Dodgers had direct bearing on the players on the field, but their academic training was not specific to baseball.

“I think the typical model was, you’re a college kid, you show up at the Winter Meetings, you get an internship,” Buffi said. “A lot of them have sports management degrees. Your whole experience/skill-set is highly baseball-specific. That just ends up being your career.

“But my experience with the Dodgers is that the things being implemented now are more generalizable. Sensors, computer vision, machine learning, statistics – all the things like ‘big data’ that people are now implementing in pro organizations – this only started to become a thing in the past five-ish years – these things are much more generalizable.”

Fearing agreed.

“The past five years there’s been a ton of innovation that is not in any way limited to R&D,” he said. “It’s across the organization, bringing in good people at every level. For the Dodgers to create that environment is not surprising.”

If Moneyball introduced the metaphor of a pendulum swinging from scouting to analytics, Fearing and Buffi are out to prove we need a new metaphor. Billy Beane once told a reporter that he was more worried about losing Farhan Zaidi, then an executive in the Oakland A’s front office, to Apple or Google than to a rival baseball team. That fear was never realized. Zaidi left the A’s for the Dodgers and now works for the Giants.

To hear Buffi and Fearing describe their hopes, their ambitions, their short- and long-term goals, is spiritually reminiscent of Silicon Valley, if not Silicon Valley. Buffi performed his doctoral research on optimizing the mechanics of baseball players before this data was coveted by actual MLB teams. He likes to repeat something he was told by his skeptical peers in college: “Jimmy, this is super cool research you’re doing, but we have no idea how you’re going to get a job doing it.”

Buffi’s first baseball opportunity came via Boddy, working for Driveline. His second came from the Dodgers. It wasn’t until recently, however, that Buffi saw the possibilities for scaling his passion project upward and outward to the public.

“Back in 2014-15, the only viable way to get 3D human movement data in sports was marker data: you have to stick 50 of these reflective balls all over your body,” he said. “It’s a super-annoying process. The system cost $50,000. I wanted it to be accessible by a lot of people. The system itself made it impossible to scale. That’s why I didn’t start the company back then.”

Now, Buffi said, he can see the possibilities for a 3D motion-capture app on the iPhone – and not just for baseball players. He’s already working on a prototype for golf. Who can analyze, customize, and interpret the results of sophisticated data for ambitious coaches and athletes? Reboot Motion, he hopes.

Fearing has so far landed six MLB teams as clients, one in each division. He’s already thinking about which major sports league might be his next frontier.

“Teams are starting to recognize there’s value in investing in the analytics space,” he said. “This is creating a new avenue to make those investments. One thing (Zelus) can do that’s hard to do internally, it’s hard to find external references when you’re working in a team environment because the only groups that have access to the same information are other teams, and they’re hesitant to share information. We allow our partner teams to compare and contrast the work they’re doing internally with ours.”

For Buffi and Fearing, it isn’t hard to imagine opportunities for growth. The principles they studied in college, and practiced with the Dodgers, readily apply across multiple sports and ability levels.

“Fifteen years ago, you stared at hours of video looking for things on a pitcher, which is not generalizable to anything,” Buffi said. “Now you’re applying a machine-learning algorithm to rows of data. That’s very generalizable.”

Therein lies a polarizing sentiment. Some will hear the sound of the passion draining from their beloved game. To others, the idea of the local baseball team as a springboard for private entrepreneurship sounds invigorating. Before long – I think – the takeaway will be much more relatable. The expansion of analytics departments across baseball, and all sports, will evoke more human faces and more universal stories.

Fearing grew up rooting for the Dodgers in the San Fernando Valley, cheering Kirk Gibson as he rounded the bases in 1988. Buffi compensated for his slight frame as a pitcher in Little League by mastering a curveball, which he kept throwing until he graduated from high school. His arm never fell off. For now, these are the foundations of the stories just beginning to emerge from behind baseball’s analytic curtain.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.